“Where am I?” he asked, when they had not gone.
One told him: “You are near the Hwa Ching Pool, and over there, in the Aloe Pavilion, sits the Emperor.” Han Im added: “The Emperor has sent for you. He desires a poem.”
Li Po closed his eyes again and lay down, a lean brown shadow under the bamboos. “Wine brings dreams of poems,” he said. “It scares the words like birds from grain. Bring wine.”
They fetched more water.
Winter Cherry came to them just as Li Po sat up again. She went down on her knees and dried his face with her sleeve. He opened his eyes wearily.
“Commands and kindness consort ill,” he said. “This is no Emperor. Who are you, girl who are wiping my face?”
She told him. “I am called Winter Cherry, and you must come and write verses for the Emperor for, if you do not, his wrath will fall on all of us.” She helped him to rise. One saw that dissipation had not wholly sapped his strength; though his legs were the narrow legs of one accustomed to riding horses.
One of the courtiers said in a reproving voice: “The philosopher Mencius told us that men’s hands and women’s hands should not meet.”
Han Im brusquely replied: “Mencius also said that a general rule was to be broken in emergencies. Li Po, here, is an emergency.” He took the poet’s arm. Winter Cherry followed them both.
“I am coming,” Li Po cried. “It is a duty which I owe to one who wiped my wet face with her sleeve.” And suddenly he seemed not to be drunk at all, for he shook off Han Im’s supporting hand and walked steadily towards the Emperor. The attendants made way for him.
In the Aloe Pavilion the Emperor sat on a throne of ivory and red damask. Near him, a picture with yellow-tiled eaves and red upright pillars for frame, Yang Kuei-fei leaned on the rail. So she had leaned when Hsuang Tsung had first loved her. She had been brought up by her attendants out of the warm water of the pool, and love had come with her. Everybody knew this. Now she stood, in a long robe of deep blue, her hair high above her high forehead, her dark eyes empty, waiting for a word.
Yang Kuei-fei yawned behind her fan.
Li Po approached and bowed with difficulty in the Emperor’s direction. “Your Majesty desires a poem,” he said. “Your Majesty shall have a poem. But, at the risk of your displeasure and your favourite’s surprise, I must attribute the authorship of this poem to Winter Cherry, here.”
The Emperor demanded: “She wrote a poem?”
Li Po replied: “She inspired it. And to inspire a poem, in this world of imperfect people, is rarer than to write one.”
“The girl has begun to interest me,” the Emperor said. “Proceed.”
Li Po turned. Winter Cherry held a skin fan which she had taken from an attendant, an ink block and a brush. She mixed the ink and gave the brush to Li Po.
He wrote on the skin of the fan, intoning as he wrote:—
He handed back the writing materials, bowed low to the Emperor as he gave him the fan, and retired with too obvious dignity into a distant part of the park, where his green-and-white tiled pavilion could be seen between the trees. They all watched him go.
“He should have written that poem to me,” Yang Kuei-fei said.
The Emperor muttered regretfully: “If he were not so exquisite a poet!”
But Winter Cherry did not seem to hear at all, for her heart went with Li Po, who had been kind to her.
It was much later, in the dark.
Han Im said: “You know that this is the custom, as surely as I know it to be the custom. Why, therefore, repine? It cannot, surely, be true that you do not desire the honour which the Son of Heaven is about to confer on you?” He held out the swansdown rug, helplessly.
Winter Cherry cried: “I do not want to go to him. Why should I want to go to him? What is there different . . . .” Then she laughed through her tears. “You look foolish, holding the rug like that—much more foolish than I look. Why should I be carried to the Emperor in no more garments than a swansdown rug?”
Han Im answered: “Long ago, in the past, when it was feared that girls going to the Emperor might do him an injury, the custom grew up: with no more weapons than nature’s nails, he is safe. Come: there is no use in crying, and the hour grows late.”
“If you were not my friend,” Winter Cherry said, “I would say that you are talking like an old woman.”
Han Im said: “I am not very different from an old woman. If I were different, I should not be serving the Son of Heaven by doing what I am doing. And yet, would you not rather have me thus occupied, who remind you somewhat of your father, instead of Yen, who is fat and unsympathetic, or Ho, who is short and sharp and has hard hands, or Wen, whose tongue is like a file?”
He picked her up from her discarded clothes, wrapped her in the rug and bore her along the passage, through a curtained door and into a silent room where the Emperor sat, moodily playing with a jade fingering-piece. When the curtain fell behind her, Winter Cherry knew that she had come into a moment of time when men and events were larger than usual, when all the myriad small things of ordinary living gave place to concentrated reality, when she, a small thing without much of a history, crossed the path of something so much greater than herself that the future would chronicle the Emperor, would paint (on paper) facets of this man whom now she saw, almost motionless, thinking thoughts which she had not ever learned to think, a man whose word sent men on great errands or little, whose wish was death or life, whose glance saw more than another’s stare. He looked tired as he sat there playing with the jade fingering-piece, his long fingers caressing its surface as (she supposed) they would soon caress her. . . . Han Im took the rug from her, and laid it over the back of a couch. The Emperor did not show any sign of having seen her.
Han Im said: “This is the girl who inspired Li Po this afternoon.” Then he withdrew.
The Emperor said: “But I had summoned you for tonight before my favourite poet chose to immortalise you in a dedication.” He turned and looked at her. “Stop shivering girl, and put that quilt round you. Do you realise that even I, the Emperor, am powerless to alter these ancient customs? Do you imagine that, if I had my way, I should be denied the pleasure of stripping petals myself? Go to the next room, where you will find clothes. Put them on and return.”
Winter Cherry, who had heard and disbelieved many tales of the Emperor’s eccentricity, obeyed. When she came back, he was watching her. She saw amusement in his face, and blushed.